Speed Punks

Move over Crash, this is the best kart racing game on the PS.

Last year, Naughty Dog's last venture into the Crash Bandicoot license, Crash Team Racing redefined how fun, how innovative, and how good looking a kart racer could be. This year, Speed Punks may not provide anything especially new, but it delivers the looks and fun in spades. Without a doubt, this is the best looking kart racing game I've ever seen -- on any platform. That's right, Speed Punks trounces Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong racing, and even CTR in the looks department, offering way more on screen than any of them and providing it without a hint of slowdown.

GameplaySpeed Punks is by no means a new concept. It's the same tried-and-true kart racing formula we've all come to love: you race around in one of six characters' custom karts, each with their own strengths and weaknesses (e.g. one's really heavy so it has low acceleration but high top speed, one's light so it accelerates fast and turns well but has a low top speed), send them careening around a track at blistering speeds (and for once, Speed Punks lives up to it's name, but more on that later), all the while firing projectiles and dropping traps. It's nothing you haven't seen before, but it's all done with such flair that you won't mind that you just fired that salvo of three rockets for the 50th time.

In the way of power-ups, Speed Punks doesn't deliver anything especially new, you have your clichéd assortment of weapons that are dropped behind you or thrown -- scratch that, thrown -- at your enemies in an effort to make it to the finish line in one piece. At your disposal are globs of slime (yeah, for making the other guy skid out), rockets (either singles, groups of three, or a 3-way salvo that's fired off at once, and homing variation that takes out the racer in front of you -- no matter where he is on the track), tire pop (which makes the all the other racers' tires melt... okay, they pop), a vortex (it opens up and races down the track ahead of you, wiping out any other racers and taking out all of their power-ups along the way), a machine gun, a potion (that makes you invisible, and wipes out anyone you touch), and speed boost tokens (both normal, small increment ones, and a large one that tops off your boost meter). All of these weapons are snagged from the now standard floating item box.

It's those speed boost tokens that really add depth to the gameplay. You can use your boost at any time -- provided you have some boost in your tank. In order to replenish it, you simply run over the small tokens scattered all over the course, or if you're lucky a large boost token from one of the out of the way item boxes. Balancing the uses of the boost and the refills is half of the race, since on all but the easiest level you'll be scrambling for the finish line. It's not necessarily as deep as CTR's hop and powerslide boost system, but it works great. Likewise, the controls, whether under the boosts or just normally fit perfectly into a kart racing game, albeit a bit more powerslide-centric than any past kart racers I've played.

The level designs are simply built for speed. In fact, Speed Punks is one of the few games that really lives up to it's namesake, offering a sense of speed you just won't find in any other kart racing game. Levels can range from caves and lava-strewn valleys to forests and even huge stadiums, absolutely packed with eye candy. As I said before, no other racer has been so gutsy as to throw so much onto the screen at once, and when it's all said and done, Funcom's excellent programming pulled it off with finesse.

GraphicsI still can't get over how good Speed Punks' looks are. It's as if Funcom somehow found a little switch buried deep inside the PlayStation code that said, "here, flip me and you can shove more polys on the screen without popup or loss in texture quality than little Sam ever thought possible." It's simply stunning to see the amount on screen, in particular on one of the early levels. In it, you're plopped down into a massive arena that not only houses the race you're about to start, but a gigantic carnival as well, so as you're ripping around a the track, you'll come into full view of a huge ride that spins airplanes over the track, so when you finally hit that corner, a huge plane swings overhead. It's simply stunning.

Another instance of absolutely sick visuals is a track that starts out in a wooded area, but then launches out onto the beach. You're offered the choice of taking the winding hillside path, or the longer, more expansive beach below. If you drop down to the beach, you'll immediately notice that you are now racing below a light layer of fog that blankets the shore and wraps itself around a beached old ship. I can't gush enough over the graphics here, and it has lead me to this decision: not only is Speed Punks the best looking racer I've ever seen (excluding some of the recent PS2 entries), it's easily one of the best looking games to ever grace the PlayStation. It's that good.What's more, Speed Punks has forced me to rethink my "less it more" approach to texturing objects in the game world. Before, I was adamant that texturing almost everything on screen was a resource hog, and often left games looking like utter crap, mainly because the texture work was so bad. In this case however, nearly everything is textured, and it's done with such variety and brilliance that I'm still dumbfounded as to how it was all pulled off while keeping both the draw distance and framerate so high. Other games have done it (not surprisingly, CTR was one of them) but the list is a single-digit one in my book. Everything, from the stones to trees has bed graced with a bright, colorful texture with nary a case of blotchiness or pixilation in sight. In fact, some of the textures actually look filtered from far away.

SoundIf there's one downside to the game, it's the sound, but it's not much of a downside. The music just doesn't have any real draw to it. It's good, and like the rest of the game, it fits perfectly, but it's not going to move you to tears or send you cheering. It's plucky, and drops a few subtle beats into mix, along with some soft ambient crescendos and decrescendos, which is at once peppy and laid back, a nice mix.

The effects are typical kart blinks and plops, with occasional waterfall or children screaming. For what they are, though, they're great. Everything from the soft hum of the karts' engines to the crowds booing you for driving by them in last place is great, and once again, fits like a glove with the graphics and level design.

The Verdict

If you're any sort of fan of kart racing (and you wanna know a little secret? I'm not, and I STILL liked this game), you absolutely MUST pick up a copy of this game. It's a complete blast and offers up more eye candy than you can cram down your sockets. Literally every time you race around a track for at least a week, you'll probably find something new to distract you from the road. If you own a PlayStation, you owe it to your self to check this game out.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention this: Speed Punks is a year old! Sony held off on its release last year for Crash Team Racing, making the graphics just that much more amazing.